Visualizing a Changing Nostromo

Conrad First provides an excellent digital archive of Conrad’s serialized fiction and features scholarship on Conrad’s work in periodicals. What follows is the first paragraph of and link to my article published by Conrad First, which highlights one of the first versioning projects conducted by the MVP:

Developments in the digital humanities continue to expand the possibilities for exploring the relationships between serial publications and their later novel editions by allowing for the collation and visualization of major revisions, detailed edits, and the trends of revisions that run within and between texts. Conradâ€™s Nostromo is ideally suited to this particular digital approach to genetic criticism because of its evolution from a serial publication in T.P.â€™s Weekly and later publications as two unique but related novel editions. Although Nostromo continues to receive much critical attention, the texts studied are usually composites of the 1904 Harper edition and the 1918 Dent edition, rather than the 1904 T.P.â€™s Weekly serial (Watts 98). However, as the primary genetic critic of Nostromo, Cedric Watts, has shown, significant changes between the editions of this text mean how we understand Nostromo is heavily dependent upon which edition is being studied. Because of the substantial and incremental revisions between all three editions, genetic critical approaches to Nostromo can elicit new understandings of the texts as individual and related entities….

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What are Versions?

Versions are the different forms texts assume as they move from manuscript to typescript, from serialization to first book edition, and across various book formats during their publication history.
Starting in June 2012, with the serial release of a digitized 1st edition of Ulysses, the MVP aims to spark a versioning culture in modernist studies by making available digitized texts that can be studied, searched, and compared.
You can see much of our students' work at the Maker Lab in the Humanities.